There was a time when people in the city didn’t worry much about trains, not like we do today.

Fall River had train service. Freight trains. Passenger trains. All the time.

No one thought much of it, since nearly every town in the United States, even very small towns, had some kind of train coming through during the first half of the last century.

Fall River had its first train service in 1845, but the city was talking about it as early as 1830.

In 1830, The Fall River Monitor, a long-vanished newspaper, commented on a petition then before the state Legislature that aimed at chartering a railroad linking Boston, Taunton, Providence and Fall River.

“There can be no objection to these or any other roads if made at the expense of such corporations, but we should prefer a road between here and Providence,” The Monitor opined.

In 1954, a man named Harold E. Clarkin, a local historian, presented a paper called “The High-Ball And The Iron Horse,” a slim volume containing his research into the origin of railroading in Fall River.

After a bit of corporate and legislative mamboing, June 9, 1845, saw a locomotive and three cars depart Fall River from a station just south of Central Street. The money for the railroad was raised by the Fall River Iron Works and a number of local citizens.

The new line ran to the town of Myricks, just south of Taunton, where it connected with the Taunton-New Bedford branch of the Boston & Providence Railroad.

By 1846, the Old Colony railroad built a Boston station to run the boat train, which brought passengers to and from boats that traveled between Fall River and New York.

By 1875, there was a good amount of train traffic running between Fall River and New Bedford, with a station on Plymouth Avenue to serve passengers in that part of the city. It was called “The Watuppa Station.”

There were various stations at various times, on Ferry Street, on Central Street, on Turner Street.

And, in 1870, the railroad built a turntable near Central Street, the one in the photo accompanying this story. That original facility was rebuilt in 1926.

The wheels on a locomotive don’t turn left and right, and a turntable makes it possible to turn a locomotive around in a small space.

There was another such facility at the bottom of Division Street, on Diamond Street and, until recently, the round outline of the structure could be seen.

The turntable pictured with this story would have been in the parking lot to the south of the granite cliffs in the parking lot of what was once Darwood Manufacturing, the building that now houses, among other things, Work Out World.

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Freight was big business in Fall River, as it was in nearly all cities.

In 1918, about six freight trains a day came into and left Fall River. The rail industry employed 250 freight handlers.

Passenger service tied into Providence, Bristol and, by extension, every other place in the nation.

Passenger service to Fall River would end in 1967, throttled, as were so many passenger stops, by the new interstate highways and the increase in car ownership.

Traces of the last passenger station, in the form of metal railings and granite stairs, remain on Durfee and Pearce Street in the North End.